Staff & Software Engineer, Payments & Billing, Consumer Monetization
About this role
Architecting and building shared services and APIs makes billing, subscription, and payment capabilities easier to adopt and extend across products. Engineers in this group design lifecycle orchestration and state synchronization across internal services, billing vendors, payment processors, and app stores while solving correctness and recovery problems involving asynchronous events and partial failures.
Consumer Monetization builds the experiences and systems that power how customers purchase and pay for OpenAI products, covering purchasing flows, payments, subscriptions, and billing. The team owns customer-facing experiences and underlying platforms, partnering with Product, Design, Growth, Data Science, and engineering teams to make purchasing effective and reliable.
Staff+ engineers are needed to evolve payments, billing, and subscription capabilities supporting the growing product portfolio. Ideal candidates bring technical ownership at the Staff level or beyond, deep experience with backend or distributed systems in production, and a strong capability for reasoning about data modeling, state transitions, idempotency, and failure recovery.
What you will do
- Architect and build shared services and APIs that make billing, subscription, and payment capabilities easier to adopt and extend across products.
- Design lifecycle orchestration and state synchronization across internal services, billing vendors, payment processors, and app stores.
- Solve correctness and recovery problems involving asynchronous events, partial failures, retries, and reconciliation.
- Improve payment success and resilience through processor integrations, routing, and recovery strategies.
- Work with risk and integrity teams to incorporate abuse prevention into purchasing flows while maintaining a reliable customer experience.
- Build testing, observability, and operational tooling that make failures easier to detect, diagnose, and resolve.
- Lead initiatives from problem definition and technical design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation.
- Provide technical leadership through hands-on development, design reviews, and mentorship.
What you need
- Demonstrated technical ownership at Staff level or beyond, shaping architecture and delivering substantial initiatives across teams.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
- Ability to reason carefully about data modeling, state transitions, idempotency, consistency, concurrency, and failure recovery.
- Experience building systems where correctness and reliability are critical, including integrations with external providers and complex dependencies.
- Strong technical judgment combined with product and business understanding to make pragmatic decisions as requirements evolve.
- Capacity to bring clarity to ambiguous problems and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical partners.
- Interest in hands-on engineering while helping other engineers develop their judgment and take on broader ownership.
Nice to have
- Experience in payments
- Experience in billing
- Experience in subscriptions or memberships
- Experience in e-commerce, offers, promotions, or other transactional platforms
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy for this role?
This role is based in San Francisco, with three days per week in the office.
What is the salary range for this position?
The salary range for this role is $266K – $445K with offers of equity.
What teams will this person work with?
You will partner closely with Product, Design, Growth, Data Science, Finance, Operations, and engineering teams across OpenAI. This collaboration ensures purchasing is effective and reliable while balancing immediate launch needs with long-term platform investments.
What kind of technical problems will I solve?
You will tackle problems where correctness, reliability, and flexibility are essential. This includes supporting new billing requirements, managing the billing lifecycle, synchronizing state across internal systems and external providers, and enabling new products and commercial models.